An Interview
with FIJA

Hello, this is Talking to America. I am your host, Aaron Zelman. Our
guests today are Ilo Jones and Don Doig of the Fully Informed Jury Association.
Today we will be talking about how you can stay free when you go to
court. Let’s start with Don. What is the purpose of a trial by
jury in the traditional and constitutional American legal system?

Don: Traditionally trial by jury had a political purpose beyond the
simple purpose of finding the facts in the case. Did someone commit
a crime or not? Beyond that and the reason why a trial by jury is so
important, I mean why not just have a judge decide the facts of the
case. Juries are traditionally the conscience of the committee. Their
purpose is to make sure that the application of the law is consistent
with committee values and traditionally it evolved that the purpose
of trial by jury is to actually ensure the rights of the people are
protected against prosecutions by the government in cases where there
might be a question about the justice of the law, the constitutionality
of the law, the fairness of the prosecution. All of that is a proper
function of the jury to decide, and in that process to ensure that the
system does not begin to systemically violate the rights of citizens.
What it comes down to is that the jury traditionally for hundreds of
years and we can go into the history of this, but for hundreds of years
the jury has had the power and we maintain the right to say not guilty
if they believe the law is unjust or unconstitutional or misapplied,
even if the law is technically violated.

Aaron: Don, I understand that there is some history behind this. There
has been some famous trials and maybe you would like to elaborate on
some of those.

Don: Sure, well arguably this power goes way back to the Magna
Carta in England and our legal traditions are derived from the English
common law tradition and it goes clear back to the Magna Carta. One
of the really important early cases was the trial of William Penn and
William
Mate who were Quaker preachers in London and this is before William
Penn moved to American-founded Pennsylvania. But back then it was illegal
to preach or to practice an unapproved religion. The only approved religion
was the Church of England, the Anglican Church. Quakers were not considered
legitimate religion and it was against the law to preach it, so the
authorities closed down William Penn’s church and in defiance
they met on the street out in front of the church and held their service.
William Penn and William Mate were arrested and put in the Tower of
London. They were possibly facing death for violating what we would
say is really a bad law, and the jury under pressure the judge told
the jury, look there is no disputing the facts of this case, they did
what they are accused of doing, and that is against the law and you
have no choice but to convict, and the jury said nope, we are not going
to do that, so that judge locked them in the jury room for several days
without food or water or toilet facilities and still refused to convict
and so they were fined and those that refused to pay the fine were actually
thrown in the Tower of London for several months until the High Court
of England threw out the case and affirmed that the jurors have the
right to vote their conscience and they are not rubber stamps for the
government and the government cannot punish them for a verdict that
the judge or the government thinks is an inappropriate verdict.

Ilo: Some others Aaron, following the Magna Carta and William Penn,
John Peter Zinger who was a German immigrant, the jury refused to find
him guilty of liable for publishing articles in his paper critical of
the king-appointed political figure and then in the Whiskey Rebellion
when they took the Whiskey Rebellion resisters, the tax-resisters, to
trial, the jury refused to convict a single one of them and they actually
had to repel the Whiskey tax. Before that in the Salem Witch Trial,
they finally ended when juries consistently refused to find any of the
accused guilty, and we all know about the Fugitive Slave Act which could
not be enforced in certain states because the jury refused to enforce
it. Prohibition, juries refused to enforce prohibition laws, so this
has been a long tradition of political control by the people who do
in fact own the government. It has been a feedback to our government.
It is a check-and-balance on government and it is an ultimate veto power
against bad laws passed by the legislature.

Don: And in the case of the Zinger Trial along with the William Penn
Trial, it was considered to be important precedence when it came time
to write the Bill of Rights. These verdicts by juries ended up becoming
part of our legal foundation in America.

Aaron: Ilo, I have a question for you along these lines. If trial by
jury is in the Bill of Rights, does that imply it has a political role?

Ilo:Yes, and we were just talking about that a little bit of course,
and the political role of trial by jury, first of all, juries as Don
was talking about earlier, are constituted to protect private sovereign
citizens from government tyranny and they can do that by refusing to
convict no matter what the charge, no matter what the law, no matter
what the evidence or the facts in the case. Juries can simply refuse
to convict. Trial by jury is of course mentioned in the Bill of Rights
three times and in the constitution itself one more time, so it is set
forth as a heading this political role as a check-and-balance on government
four times in our constitution. Now, why is it there? Well as we know
and we see this sometimes, of course, in concealed carry and weapon
carry cases. We have the right to self defense. We have the right to
life and you do not have the right to life unless you can exercise your
right to defense that life. Jurors simply refuse to convict people who
are trying to defend their life or the lives of their family and in
doing so, they can circumvent all of the government employees, all of
the people who work for the government, who are part of the political
structure of government by vetoing the actions of the government and
unfortunately, it still, of course, harms the people who are charged
it and being persecuted by government because they have to pay for an
attorney sometimes, sometimes they lose their jobs. We had a case we
worked on of a fellow driving through Ohio with weapons which he had
legally of course, as you would have to be under the second amendment,
but he didn’t have legal permission in Ohio and so they arrested
him and they trashed his vehicle and confiscated a lot of his property,
including his computer which he needed for work and he didn’t
get a jury trial. We hoped he would get a jury trial because we were
educating all the people in that area so that they could step in and
exercise their political role of serving as a check-and-balance on government,
and we continue to do that. That is what the jury is for – to
protect citizens against government action that is unfair. Juries, of
course, also can protect society from truly dangerous people who are
really criminals where there is a victim or those people are violent
or need to be locked away to keep society safe, but mostly juries are
there to protect innocent people or people who have not done anything
that is actually a crime, where there is no victim, and that way act
as a political check on our government and our legislature’s creation
of unreasonable laws.

Aaron: Let me jump into a question here that I am sure a lot of people
are thinking about at this moment, which is what is the legal doctrine
of jury nullification?

Don: That is actually the name of the legal doctrine is jury nullification
and it is that jurors have the power to vote their conscience and to
acquit if they believe that justice requires they believe the law is
wrong, unjust or unconstitutional. That is not to say that they have
the power to bring a conviction beyond what has been charged by the
prosecutor and it does not mean that the actions of the jury have any
precedent in terms of changing the law or anything like that. It is
that in this particular case, being heard by this particular jury, they
can say not guilty and let that particular defendant go free and that
is the extent of their power, but it is power that cannot be questioned
under our system and that is absolute. Two reasons for that. A not guilty
verdict cannot be appealed and jurors cannot be punished for their verdict,
even if it goes against the letter of the law, and the oath that they
are asked to take is actually a false oath because it is not really
enforceable.

Aaron: It is often said Don that there are four boxes to defend freedom.
Would you like to elaborate on those?

Don: Sure, probably in order of which one you go to first. There is
the soap box, which is the first amendment – the right to freedom
of speech, and there is the ballot box, which if we are not talking
about electronic voting and vote scam and things like that, that is
the ability to elect representatives in the constitutional republic.
Both of those are under attack these days as we know. The third box
is the jury box, and the fourth box, of course, is the cartridge box.
Now the cartridge box is the last resort and we all hope that it never
comes to that in defense of our freedom, so trial by jury is getting
right down there though. Once you get to trial by jury, you haven’t
gotten many options left to preserve our freedom and that is under attack
too. Trial of jury as an institution is under attack in several different
ways. Just recently we had a jury in Idaho who was actually arrested
for voting her conscience in the jury room and they finally had to dismiss
that, but that is what it has come to and we have pressure from prosecutors
to intimidate people with charge multiplication so they end up pleading
guilty even if they are innocent they sometimes plead guilty, so there
are all kinds of ways that trial by jury is under attack and not least
of which is their attempt to intimidate the juror into thinking that
they don’t have the power of jury nullification.

Aaron. Why is jury nullification under attack?

Don: Well, because if jury nullification becomes really widespread,
it would be hard to sustain the current load of bad law that we are
saddled with.

Ilo: When our country was founded Aaron, all of the citizens understood
that they have the right to nullify bad laws and to refuse to enforce
bad laws when they served on a jury, and because a jury is an exquisitely
constituted body of 12 disinterested citizens, it doesn’t mean
that we scofflaws running around. It meant that when 12 people sat down
and deliberated together, they could determine as members of their community
whether or not they wanted to enforce those laws, but what has happened
over time is that there have been some decisions which first said the
judges no longer had to inform juries that they had this authority because
everybody knew it. It was assumed that everyone already knew that they
had the authority to nullify and then that was taken and eventually
was transmuted or warped into saying that even attorneys in court could
not tell juries they had the right to nullify. Not that they didn’t
have to, but that they couldn’t. About the only people these days
who are able to inform jurors in the courtroom that they have the authority
to nullify or to veto bad law are people who represent themselves and
have more latitude than do lawyers, who of course being members of the
Bar and Officers of the Court can be punished by losing their license
or forbidden to practice in certain areas if they do something which
is not amenable to the judge. So, we have lost this authority which
we have always had over time and as the whole system of juries is being
attacked, nullification is not only being attacked but we have seen
in writing in jury instructions, one state, the state of Washington,
it actually says in their jury instructions that nullification is against
the law. It isn’t and so that is why we are here to help people
exercise this authority that they have. When a jury is constituted at
a trial, it is the highest authority in the courtroom. It has higher
authority than the judge. As Don said, their verdict cannot be appealed
if they find the defendant not guilty. So we are not teaching something
new. We are restoring a right as much as when this country was founded,
we had the right to keep and bear arms without the government infringing
upon that at all. We at that time, jurors, private citizens, had the
right when they served on a jury to nullify or veto or refuse to enforce
bad laws or misapplied laws, and so you can see how there is this erosion
of free exercise of our rights that goes fairly well across the board.

Aaron: Our guests today are Ilo Jones and Don Doig of Fully Informed
Jury Association. Ilo, I have another question for you. It is along
the lines of what you were just talking about. If someone is called
for jury duty, are there other obstacles that are put in front of them?
Are there other things being done to make it more difficult for a juror
to be honest and to judge the facts of the case as well as the law?

Ilo: Yes, Aaron, these days as a matter of fact, that is an excellent
question, and for some of your listeners, if they are called for jury
duty, they may face this during voir dire which is the process of selecting
the actual jurors from the jury pool. They may be asked, for instance,
if they know about jury nullification. They may be asked if they know
about FIJA. They may be asked if they are willing to follow the law
as it is given to them by the judge without question. They probably
won’t add the words “without question” but that is
what they are implying. If they know about FIJA, if they know about
jury nullification, if they say they will follow the law as long as
they don’t find anything misapplied, or if they make any conditional
responses to that question, the chances are about 99 out of 100 that
they will be excused from jury duty. If they and we had this happen,
would in fact during this process of questioning potential jurors would
raise their hand and say “As I understand it, your honor, I think
I have the right to nullify the law if I think it is being misapplied
or it is unfair or unjust or unconstitutional law and I understand that
that is my right as a juror”, the judge may dismiss the entire
jury pool as being tainted.

Aaron: Well, that could be good. (Laughter)

Ilo: Certainly, all those people will go home and think.

Aaron: It might be a silver lining.

Ilo: But that is an obstacle that jurors face, trying to get even on
a jury and be honest by saying yes, they understand that they have all
this authority, and then if they are on the jury as we just had with
this case in Idaho which Don mentioned, and during jury deliberations
you might say something such as “Well, I don’t think this
law is really fair” or “I answer to a higher power”
or “I don’t know I think the way that the police gathered
evidence is a violation of the person’s rights even though the
judge said we had to ignore that”, there is a good chance that
they will be removed from the jury and we know of instances where jurors
have been prosecuted for felony perjury because they have taken the
oath and then made statements like that in the sanctity of the jury
deliberation room.

Don: That still remains really rare though.

Ilo: So far.

Don: Yes.

Aaron: So if someone tells the judge that they believe that the Almighty’s
Law is a higher law and more important than the state law, what the
judge’s attitude be.

Ilo: They would probably be excused from serving on the jury. In fact,
I would almost guarantee that they would be excused from serving on
the jury.

Aaron: Wouldn’t that be a giveaway to all the rest of the jurors
as to what they are dealing with?

Ilo: Yes.

Aaron: The criminality of it all.

Ilo: People have been educated in government schools to believe that
government is in fact sometimes the highest authority in known existence,
and so if you ask them if you are in the courtroom, which is the higher
authority, your creator or the judge? They will say in the courtroom,
of course, the judge is the only authority. They will say that.

Don: The judge makes them take an oath and that can be pretty intimidating.
An oath to follow the law as the judge gives it to them.

Aaron: Is that the oath.

Don: Yes.

Aaron: Okay. Welcome to the Soviet Union. How are juries selected and
how has this changed during the history of our country.

Don: It is mostly a random process as far as getting the jury pool
assembled. They have a jury wheel which is randomly selected from driver’s
license lists and voter registration lists, and so the people that show
up come from those lists, and at that point it is fairly random, but
then you get into the voir dire process which can be really intrusive
and really invasive of privacy, and then they do their best to select
the lowest common denominator among the jury pool and eliminate anybody
who in many cases has any education, they certainly eliminate anybody
who seems to be a rebel or has any kind of independent thought going
on, and we think that in contrast of what should happen is that the
first 12 jurors that are there, as long as they don’t have any
personal interest in the case relative on trial or a business relationship
or that sort of thing, other than that, the first 12 there should be
seated. Then you have a random jury, but if you had that, then you might
get a lot more nullification going on and that would be highly inconvenient.
That is extensive for the government and it is embarrassing to the prosecutor.

Ilo: Early in our country’s history Aaron, potential jurors were
brought in and they were asked if there was any compelling reason they
could not render a fair verdict and if there was, they were excused
and the rest or 12 were seated from that group. As Don said, people
were only excused from jury duty if they knew one of the litigants or
they were the cousin of the victim or something like that. Other than
that, we trusted each other to render a fair and reasonable verdict
and it seemed to work very well and of course, the juries again at that
time refused to enforce bad laws.

Aaron: Let me ask you a question if you wouldn’t mind speculating
as to why we don’t trust each other as much anymore?

Ilo: I think it is because many of us have been taught, and again in
government schools that rather than place our trust in each other, we
should place our trust in government. When you are bombarded constantly
with don’t trust this merchant, we need more laws to protect you
the consumer from buying his cookies because you know he may be trying
to kill his customers, or don’t trust this man to provide with
safe working conditions because obviously he doesn’t care about
his workers, and so government will protect you. When we are taught
that we need to send our children to government schools because home
schoolers obviously abuse their children and don’t teach them
anything and keep them isolating and probably working in sweatshop labor,
I hear these horror stories. Most of these alarms that are being raised,
and they are all around, come to us from statists and government employees
who have a vested interest in protecting their paycheck and their positions
of power. I am not saying that they even do this consciously. It is
how they live.

Aaron: Do you think that all of the things that you have been talking
about here might be the overlying reason or the fundamental reason why
jury nullification is not taught in schools? I would think that even
if you went to law school, they are not teaching this or am I wrong?

Ilo: You are correct.

Don: Right, it would shift the balance of power in this country if
it were taught and obviously the powers that be that control the schools
and media and such don’t want to see that happen. A lot has been
invested in giving the government grown to the place that it is right
now and they don’t want to do anything to upset that applecart.

Aaron: You talked about jurors being punished a couple hundred years
ago. What about today?

Don: There have been at least a couple cases that I know of where it
was attempted, maybe Ilo knows more, but in one case a juror in Colorado
was convicted for apparently supposedly not being forthcoming during
the questioning and not volunteering information and that was overturned
on appeal. And then there was the case in Idaho that just concluded
and those charges were dropped, so I am not actually aware of where
charges have actually stuck?

Ilo: I am not either, but what has happened Aaron over the last 20
years or so and especially since FIJA has been around to tell people
about their authority or remind them of their authority as jurors, we
are seeing far fewer jury trials as people are so afraid of the machinery
of the government justice or injustice system that they will plead out
rather than risk any kind of a trial because they are fearful and they
realize that the judge probably will not allow all of the evidence that
they need to present for their defense to be heard by the jury. They
are fearful that they will lose and receive some kind of a mandatory
maximum sentence or mandatory minimum sentence that is very long. They
know by the time they have been caught up in the cogs of this machine
of the legal system, they can see that they are going to be fearfully
abused and that justice will probably not be rendered and so they will
do anything to hide from worse punishment than they may get if they
simply plead out and take something. Another side of that of course
is that for most of these people, they have families and going to trial
and mounting a defense had disseminate a family financially and so if
they want their wife and children or whatever to have anything left
while they are in prison, the odds being good that they will go whether
they are innocent or not, then it is best if they just plead out and
at least leave their family with their home and their meager savings.

Aaron: Well, alright. So let us speculate a little. We have a nation
full of people who fear the government, a government that is apparently
so corrupt that you simply can’t fix it, what do we tell people
to do to bring back a Bill of Rights culture?

Ilo: Some things I tell them to do personally and also as part of FIJA,
I tell them whoever the incumbents are in office, vote them out. Change
this every four years until they get the idea that we aren’t putting
up with career death spots in office. Serve on juries. Run to serve
on juries and unless they show you a dead person, not a violated statutory
law put in by some bureaucrat, unless they show you a harmed human being,
refuse to vote in favor of a guilty verdict. Refuse to render a verdict
of guilty. I tell people as well because if juries fail to protect our
rights and if juries cannot protect every exercise of those rights,
we need to be able to defend ourselves from people breaking into our
houses and becoming predatory. I tell people to spend time on the range
and practice and make sure they have a good aim and I am being honest.
I am being honest, that is what I tell people these days.

Aaron: Good for you.

Don: Also I would point out that over the last however many years,
15-20 years, the powers that be have lost control of the flow of information
and the latest and greatest in that story has been the Internet.

Aaron: Today there was an article on the Internet that came out of
England about Rupert Murdoch who is a media baron who has made it very
clear that the old media is dead. The bloggers, the Internet, that websites
are going to replace newspapers, so I think that is good news for freedom.

Don: We hope so because the Internet is a hot bed of alternative history
and alternative thinking on questions like the Bill of Rights culture,
so I think everybody should get plugged into that because you are not
going to find out the truth by watching the evening news and by reading
the daily paper.

Ilo: By the way, everything we have been talking about today is as
important for defendants to know about demanding a trial by jury and,
of course, we assist sometimes in cases by sending a lot of literature
out or providing literature for them for people to give out to the jury
pool in their community, but I want to say that this is also very important
for defendants to demand a jury trial, demand their rights, and not
give them up because they are intimidated by the court system.

Aaron: Ilo, can you tell people where they can obtain your information
and literature and a website.

Ilo: I would be happy to. Our website is www.fija.org
(Sorry - link expired, JPFO webmaster) If you would like a free packet of information, we have an 800 number.
It is 1-800-TELJURY (1-800-835-5879). If you leave your name and address
at that number, you will receive a free packet of information which
I hope you will read and then share with someone else.

Aaron: What can people do aside from getting the information from you,
the free packet, to help spread the word and to help enlighten you know
millions of Americans about how their rights are being destroyed by
not allowing them to judge the law as well as the facts of the case.

Ilo: Aaron, we have a free powerpoint presentation that we are happy
to send out along with a packet of literature. We encourage people that
if you belong to a church group or a civic organization, even the PTA,
if you have a group of cub scouts, if you are a teacher, whatever you
do, if you have a group in which you participate, get some of our literature,
get our powerpoint presentation if you have a way to use it, and schedule
a time to have a talk about jury duty and what it is and what it means
in this country and share these ideas with those around you and open
it up for some discussion and if we have a speaker in the area and we
do have speakers around and those are listed on our website under state
contacts, they will be happy to come and speak to your group, but we
have found that people once they have read our literature and the idea
sparks with them and lights a fire in their mind, they are quite capable
of holding a discussion group with their local civic group or whomever,
or even just with your family or at your workplace, write to us, get
some literature, and spread the word. Hand out our website. We have
posters you can put up. We have a lot of information to share.

Aaron: Why should gun owners pay very close attention to what you are
doing, to what you are telling people, and how will they benefit if
they do so?

Don: In a sense, trial by jury is the peaceful mechanism by which we
protect all the other rights in the Bill of Rights. You can protect,
for instance, the right to keep and bear arms when the BATF or local
police arrest someone on bogus firearm charges to just simply vote not
guilty in those cases if you are on the jury. And so that protects the
second amendment to the Bill of Rights. It protects all the other rights
in the Bill of Rights through the process of trial by jury, and I submit
that that is a preferable way to protect the Bill of Rights than by
finally resorting to the cartridge box, if we can, if we can do that.

Aaron: Let me ask you one last very simple question. Is there anything
that we haven’t covered that you think is crucial for people to
know about?

Ilo: I wanted to make one point. Jurors when they are constituted as
a body, as a jury, have again the ultimate authority in the courtroom.
They cannot be punished for their verdict and they have the power to
protect not the rights guaranteed under the Bill of Rights, but all
human rights which are intrinsic for all humans in the world, and jurors
have those rights as well and certainly the highest one they must use
when they serve on a jury is to exercise their conscience and their
independent thinking mind in rendering a verdict no matter what the
judge or the prosecutor or anybody else tells them to do.

Don: And for as much as they apparently hate this right and this power
of the people, they have not yet succeeding in prosecuting anyone successfully
for it in all of the trials all around the country where it has been
an issue. It is still abundantly clear that you have the right and the
power to vote your conscience as a juror and they are not going to punish
you because they don’t have that kind of power.

Aaron: Today our guests have been Ilo Jones and Don Doig of FIJA (Fully
Informed Jury Association), and they have been helping us learn about
Fully Informed Jury and jury nullification and hopefully we are going
to be able to put this to good use. The Patriotic Act probably will
create plenty of reasons and opportunities for people to have to deal
with the court system.

I have been your host, Aaron Zelman. This has been Talkin to America”
and remember if you won’t defend your rights, don’t complain
when you lose them.

Opinions expressed on this program do not necessarily reflect those
of JPFO.org or its members.